A few days ago, I was busy studying the Dao, so I didn't update the content much. Recently, the rules of Alpha have changed quite a bit, from initially having no threshold to later adding various restrictions, and then to officially launching the Alpha point threshold, which started at 45 points and has now increased to around 200. Many people find it difficult to decide whether to continue accumulating points. Today, let's talk about my views on this.
At the beginning, my understanding of Alpha was that Binance hoped to open up a new sector to avoid user complaints about price drops after directly listing on the CEX main board. Moreover, competitors are far ahead in decentralized wallets and on-chain technology, while Binance has been lagging in these two areas.
Previously, Binance was criticized for the black box of listing coins and for having poor wallets, which even made the top influencer cry in a SPACE session. It’s easy to imagine the pressure the platform executives are under. It was just right to connect CEX and on-chain through Alpha.
Later, Binance officials also explained that Alpha is a 'pre-listing token selection pool', aiming to improve the transparency and fairness of the coin listing process, which aligns with my understanding. This has led to the ecosystem and projects continuously competing, scrambling to distribute tokens for airdrops and IPOs, hoping to eventually get listed on Binance’s main board.
Therefore, I believe that in the future, there will be a large number of projects waiting to be launched. There’s no need to worry about project exhaustion in a month or two; projects wanting to go live will have plenty of room until the end of the year. The only thing we need to consider is whether the input-output ratio for accumulating points is appropriate.
Now let’s look at the changes after the launch of Alpha points. After the rules for Alpha points were launched, it essentially made the rules transparent. It no longer requires you to trade a certain amount or hold a certain amount of tokens; instead, it gives everyone a public rule to accumulate points, and in the future, thresholds will be based solely on points, somewhat similar to how college entrance exam cutoffs work.
At first, everyone's mindset had not yet changed, and with the very low returns from the previous few rounds before the points were introduced, many people had already given up on the competition. Therefore, the first round only required 45 points to participate. Later, as professional token farming studios began entering the scene to accumulate points, the point threshold continued to rise, resulting in many users feeling that they were 'always one step behind'.
On May 13, 2025, there was a major update to the rules, introducing a point consumption mechanism. Based on the current rounds, each deduction is 15 points, which makes it necessary for everyone to make certain choices when receiving airdrops, making it difficult to just rely on high points to claim every time as before. Those who lag behind won’t be able to claim at all. This is somewhat beneficial for many small fund users. So I expect this point consumption mechanism to last for a while.
In the whole Alpha airdrop and IPO event, the standout performance was the NXPC (MapleStory Island) incident. NXPC is a token issued by Nexpace (a subsidiary of Nexon Blockchain) that supports the MapleStory Universe (the Web3 version of MapleStory).
According to NXPC Records Massive Gains, on May 15, 2025, at 6:00 UTC, NXPC went live on Binance Alpha, and spot trading began at 7:30 UTC. Those who meet the point requirement can claim 198 NXPC tokens.
After NXPC went live, the price skyrocketed, with a first-day increase of 2900%, peaking at $3.8. This means that a single airdrop could reach up to $750, setting a record for the highest returns from Alpha airdrops.
This high return has also led more people to start accumulating points. The next SOON event on May 23 is highly anticipated; let's see how many points will be required and what the returns will be then.
Currently, it is recommended to accumulate ZKJ, with a slippage of 0.1% and a wear cost of about 1000U/0.2U. The trading point range is more suitable at 12-16 points; how much to accumulate really depends on the individual, but too little makes it very hard to catch up, while too much makes the input-output ratio not worth it.
